MARKETING RESEARCH IN ACTION Implementing a Diversity Ecosystem: Challenges and Opportunities Recent calls for racial justice and increased diversity in cities across the United States vowed to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion. Whether their intentions were politically motivated, sincere, or a combination of both, implementation of increased diversity in cities and counties has been challenging and slow. For example, established municipal rules, including low-bidder laws, have created an entrenched system for purchasing services for manufactured goods, road repair, and construction projects that favors larger companies. At the same time, cities are often understaffed, and employees are paid below market value. Yet, government employees are tasked with the challenge to increase diversity and do it quickly. Consider, for example, a typical medium-sized city in the United States. The population is 52 percent African Americans, 46 percent white, and 4 percent other, including Asians and Latinos. Suppliers to the City's purchasing department, however, are 87 percent white and 13 percent African American. These suppliers range from businesses that manufacture products needed by local police and fire departments, to construction companies for municipal projects and road work. In this typical city, the Mayor and City Council have met and discussed the need to implement programs that encourage more diversity, equity, and inclusion in selecting Purchasing Department suppliers. Council members have been watching recent moves to expand diversity in cities around the country, and their constituents are asking for more diversity in the city. The Mayor and City Council members want to get reelected, and they recognize altering diversity of among city employees will be slower than increasing diversity among suppliers. The Marketing Team was asked to communicate these efforts to city and county employees. They believe this would encourage city employees to more strongly support diversity efforts in the purchasing department, as well as other departments making purchases with city funds. Not surprisingly, the employees greet this message from the marketing team with skepticism. For example, other dictates from the Mayor and City Council have asked employees to stop smoking outside municipal and governmental buildings. This angered the small percentage of smokers in the building. The top leaders also tried to encourage recycling efforts by installing recycling bins near desks in most of the City's buildings. The smoking cessation and recycling messages communicated via social media were directed to an audience of employees as well as other city residents. City employees felt both of these efforts had more to do with making a "good show" of popular cultural trends rather than actual change. Most city employees fall under the State personnel system. They are long-term employees who have regularly seen elected Mayors and City Council members come and go. The employees are more concerned with pay, pensions, healthcare, and other benefits. They tend to continue working for lower pay because the city is one of the few employers that still offers a pension benefit after 25 years of service. It takes 10 years of city service to become vested in the retirement system, and some younger workers do not expect to remain a city employee that long. For example, many millennials and Gen Z workers do not plan to stay until their vesting date, much less their full retirement. They want to be paid more now, and they plan to handle their retirements without becoming vested in the State pension system. While most city employees do not consider themselves racist or bigoted, they simply do not feel the need to diversify suppliers. Their general sentiment is it would take more work, upset a system that is working fine, and take the Mayor and the City Council members attention away from what younger employees want most: higher pay now. The difference between what top leaders, in this case the Mayor and City Council members, want for diversity efforts and how it is perceived by the employees is an intriguing and complicated challenge. In this case, top leaders' desire for organizational change is filtered through the marketing department via an internal marketing process to the stakeholder group of employees. Page139 The Diversity Ecosystem is an emerging movement that examines the willingness of an organization to increase its diversity. The Diversity Ecosystem includes four concepts: (1) Organizational Justice, (2) Openness for Change, (3) Need for Diversity, and (4) Employee Voice. Organizational Justice has four dimensions: Distributive-how things are provided to different employees; Procedural-how the process affects employees; Informational-how news is shared across the organization; and Interpersonal-employee perceptions of how the manager treats employees. The second concept, Openness for Change, is measured on different dimensions, such as how the organization is poised for change and how ready the employee is for change. The third concept, Need for Diversity, evaluates employee perceptions of the organization's need to change to stay competitive. Finally, Employee Voice measures the extent to which an employee feels their input is directed toward influencing the work environment. Initial research suggests the strength of a Diversity Ecosystem directly effects the implementation of efforts toward stakeholder diversity, including internal stakeholders such as employees. Thus, once the Mayor and City Council communicate their desire for more diversity among suppliers, department personnel are expected to provide input on the best approach to achieve diversity outcomes. One approach would involve qualitative research to determine how employees interpret proposed alternative messages toward increased diversity among suppliers. Personal interviews or focus groups could suggest questions for a quantitative survey among all employees. The logical follow up would be survey research with a sample of employees using valid and reliable quantitative methods to obtain opinions about the move toward supplier diversity. The Mayor and City Council members are pressurizing the marketing department to quickly implement a message strategy that effectively communicates the need for more diversity among suppliers. But the department knows developing an effective message strategy requires research. Hands-On Exercises 1. After identifying possible qualitative and quantitative methods to achieve these research objectives, discuss the pros and cons of each method. For example, how would you assess whether employee opinions about an increase in diversity among suppliers are valid? 2. If you were designing a focus group of employees, what factors would you consider to be sure the focus groups are representative of the city and its workers? 3. If you were designing a quantitative survey of employees, what type of sample design would be best to obtain representative opinions from employees? How would you insure anonymity of individual responses on the quantitative survey, as well as a broad range of employee opinions? 4. City employees are likely to have different opinions on issues than management or staff workers. Also, employees at different stages of their career with the city could have different opinions. How would you approach this to insure a representative sample of opinions? 5. Would you search for secondary data for this survey? If so, where might you find the data and what type of data would likely be useful? 6. Would you consider what other cities or counties in the state or region have done when seeking to improve supplier diversity? How would you find this data? How would you use this data to develop the survey questions